Betty Gillies - flight leader

Betty Gillies (January 7, 1908 – October 14, 1998) was a pioneering American aviatrix who worked to promote the role of women in aviation, and the first pilot to qualify for the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (which became the Women Airforce Service Pilots, WASPs) during World War II.

She began taking flying lessons in 1928, and earned her license in 1929. Later that year, she attended a meeting of other female pilots, where they formed The Ninety-Nines (so named because there were 99 charter members) led by flying pioneer Amelia Earhart. In 1930 she married Bud Gillies, vice president at Grumman Aircraft Corporation. And she continued flying, working to earn a commercial pilot's license.

In 1939, she served as president of the 99s and organized efforts to convince the Civil Aeronautics Authority to repeal its ban on women flying during pregnancy. This was a personal issue for Betty, as she was a young mother and anticipated having more children. If pregnant and postpartum women couldn't fly, they wouldn't be able to meet the required 10 hours of flight every six months to maintain their commercial license, forcing them to retake all their tests again after their child was born, at considerable expense.

When the US finally entered World War II, women pilots were ready to step in as needed. When Betty received a telegram from her friend and fellow pilot Nancy Love to join her new wartime program, the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, Betty left immediately. By this time she'd been flying for 14 years, with over 1400 flying hours and several aeronautical ratings, and she became the first pilot to qualify. When Nancy Love left to start another branch in Texas shortly thereafter, Betty was promoted to squadron leader assigned to the 2nd Ferrying Group, based out of Wilmington, Delaware, on the New Castle Army Air Base, where she served during the duration of the war.

Her job was to organize ferrying missions from the factories where the planes were assembled to air bases across North America where they would then be flown into service by male soldiers. This enabled more men to be sent overseas, while women would perform as many stateside duties as possible.

Ferrying was an often grueling job, requiring pilots to fly long distances in all kinds of weather, with only short breaks to refuel the planes and let the pilots rest. One mission required four legs between Maryland and Alberta, Canada. Betty's squadron ferried four fighters and were back on base two days later.

But there was adventure too. During this time she got to fly a variety of planes commissioned by the Navy. She was the first woman to fly the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt fighter, and at the other end of the flying spectrum, she and Nancy Love were the first women to fly the Boeing B-17s Flying Fortress.

After the war, she and her family moved to California, where Betty operated a ham radio, connecting phone calls to ships in the Pacific, as well as communicating regularly with staff and Navy personnel in the Antarctic, and participating in the Navy MARS program (Military Auxiliary Radio System, where civilians assisted the military with communication efforts during times of emergency). She continued flying, and remained active in promoting the role of women in aviation. From 1953 to 1961, she served as the Chair of the All Woman Transcontinental Air Race, and in 1964 she served on the first Federal Aviation Administration Women's Advisory Committee.

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Ola Mildred Rexroat - brave pilot

Ola Mildred "Millie" Rexroat (August 28, 1917 – June 28, 2017) was born in Argonia, Kansas, in 1917. Her father was a white man who worked as a publisher and editor, and her mother was an Oglala-Lakota Indian who grew up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. While Millie's family moved from town to town as she was growing up, she spent plenty of time visiting her grandmother on the reservation in South Dakota. In 1932, she graduated from St. Mary's Indian High School for Girls in Springfield, South Dakota, but didn't have much of an idea of what she wanted to do with her life. Over the next few years she bounced around from location to location, and job to job, before finally settling down to complete her bachelor's degree in art from the University of New Mexico in 1939.

When the US finally entered World War II, Millie and her mother and sisters moved to Washington, DC, where they found work at the Army War College. But Millie wasn't content to spend the war working in an office. She wanted to do something more. At first she considered joining the Women's Army Corps (WAC), or maybe the United States Naval Reserve (WAVES), but when she learned of the WASPs, she was sure that was where she belonged.

Millie had no prior flying experience, but that didn't stop her. She found a local flight school that offered a series of lesson for only $8 an hour. After 35 hours of flying, she was qualified to apply. After graduating from training in Sweetwater, Texas, in 1944, she became the only Native American woman to serve in the WASPs. She was stationed at Eagle Pass Army Airfield where she took on the dangerous job of towing aerial gunnery targets to help new recruits learn to operate the big machinery.

"You didn't have time to be frightened or scared or anything like that. I was usually more concerned about my landings."

Sadly for Millie, the WASP program was disbanded later that same year. But she had found her place. Even if she wasn't able to fly, she could still work with other pilots. She joined the Air Force Reserves, where she was called into active duty during the Korean War, and later served for ten years as an air traffic controller.

For more information about her life and career, check out her bio on the Fly Girls series site.

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Hazel Ying Lee - fearless flyer

In 1932, Hazel Ying Lee (August 24, 1912 – November 25, 1944) became one of the first Chinese-American women to earn a pilot's license. It was only months after her first airplane ride, when she'd been so thrilled by the experience she immediately joined the Chinese Flying Club of Portland, Oregon, where she'd lived her entire life. At the time, she was working as an elevator operator at a department store, one of the few jobs a Chinese-American woman could get at the time. Her mother tried to talk her out of flying, but Hazel wasn't having it. She was going to become a pilot and find a way to fly as often as possible.

The very next year, when Japanese forces began to make incursions into China, Hazel traveled all the way to China planning on volunteering for the Chinese Air Force. They turned her away because of her gender, despite their dire need for trained pilots. She stayed in China, working for a private airline. In 1937, when Japan finally invaded China, with large scale bombings, it was Hazel's ability to remain calm in a crisis that likely saved the lives of many of her friends and family, as she was able to locate a safe shelter for them during the attacks. In 1938, she escaped to Hong Kong, and then made her way to New York, where she worked for the Chinese government as a buyer to help them secure materials for their war effort.

When the US joined the war, Hazel looked for opportunities to serve, but there were few openings for women. In 1943, though, with the creation of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), she found a job that suited her perfectly. She enlisted as soon as she could, and was in the 4th class of pilots accepted and sent to Sweetwater, Texas, for training. She was then assigned to the third Ferrying Group, based out of Michigan, where the auto factories were now building aircraft for the war. Her group was tasked with flying the planes from the factory to central locations around the country where they would then be shipped to the either the European or Pacific fronts.

Hazel was well respected by her fellow service pilots as well as her superiors. She was often heard saying she'd "take and delivery anything." No risk was too much for her. During her time as a WASP, she had two forced landings -- where she had to land a plane under less than ideal circumstances -- and in both cases it was her cool demeanor that probably saved her life. In one case, she had to set the plane down in a Kansas wheat field, and then fend off an angry farmer who was convinced she was a Japanese invader.

Photo caption: WASPs being briefed in ready-room, Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas, May 1943. Front row, l to r: Group Commander Charles M. Sproul, Irma Cleveland, Faith Buchner, Martha Lundy, Mary Jane Stevens, Anabelle Kekic. Back row, l to r: Ruby Mullins, Hazel Ying Lee, Virginia Harris Mullins. Source: Texas Women's University.

In 1944, she was selected for a prestigious series of intensive training classes at the Pursuit School at Brownsville, Texas, where she and a handful of other women pilots who flew the faster, higher powered fighters.

Unfortunately, her flying career ended entirely too soon. In November 1944 she was sent to upstate New York to pick up a plane to deliver to Montana. As she was approaching the runway for her final landing on this multi-leg journey, there was a mix up in the control tower, and she collided with another plane. Both went up in flames, and while they were able to pull her from the wreck, she died two days later from her burns.

I wonder what would have become of her after the war had she lived? Would she have gone on to become one of the female pilots who continued flying for either private or military projects, like WASP director Jackie Cochran? Would she have traveled the world with her husband, another Chinese-American pilot she'd met in Portland, while he served as a Chinese diplomat? Would she have been the first Asian American selected as a candidate for the Mercury 13 group of possible female astronauts? Who knows?

Even though she died young, she had already established herself as a brave young woman unafraid of taking risks and using her skills for the greater good. It's telling that the one of the first things she decided to do once she'd earned her license was to head off to a war front to serve. And for that, she's definitely a Self-Rescuing Princess Society role model.

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